What is Journal Impact Factor?

Daunted by the idea of choosing the right journal for your paper? Don’t be. Metrics have become an everyday word in scholarship in general and its many fields of research – if not all of them – for they provide important data about a journal’s impact and relevance among its readers. In an era of information proliferation, it has become increasingly important to know where to capture the most attention and interest of the audience you want.

So, whenever you are in doubt about which journal suits you better, don’t forget to browse its metrics; they will certainly help you with the decision making. Start, for example, with the Journal Impact Factor.

Impact factor (IF) is a measure of the number of times an average paper in a journal is cited, during a year. Clarivate Analytics releases the Journal Impact Factors annually as part of the Web of Science Journal Citation Reports®. Only journals listed in the Science Citation Index Expanded® (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index® (SSCI) receive an Impact Factor.

What is a good impact factor for a scientific journal?

Impact Factors are used to measure the importance of a journal by calculating the number of times selected articles are cited within a particular year. Hence, the higher the number of citations or articles coming from a particular journal, or impact factor, the higher it is ranked. IF is also a powerful tool if you want to compare journals in the subject category.

Measuring a Journal Impact Factor:

Use journal metrics to understand the impact of a journal:

CiteScore metrics – helps to measure journal citation impact. Free, comprehensive, transparent and current metrics calculated using data from Scopus®, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.
SJR – or SCImago Journal Rank, is based on the concept of a transfer of prestige between journals via their citation links.
SNIP – or Source Normalized Impact per Paper, is a sophisticated metric that accounts for field-specific differences in citation practices.
JIF – or Journal Impact Factor is calculated by Clarivate Analytics as the average of the sum of the citations received in a given year to a journal’s previous two years of publications divided by the sum of “citable” publications in the previous two years.
h-index – Although originally conceived as an author-level metric, the h-index has been being applied to higher-order aggregations of research publications, including journals.

Deciding the perfect journal for your paper is an important step. Metrics are undoubtfully excellent tools to guide you through the process, however, we also recommend not to neglect a perfectly written text, not only scientific and grammatically but also fitting the chosen journal’s requirements and scope. In Elsevier, we provide text-editing services that aim to amend and adjust your manuscript in order to increase the chances of a successful acceptance by your target journal. Although each journal has its own editorial team, the overall quality, language and whether the article is innovative may play a role as well.